The exemplary embodiment relates to public reviews of services and finds particular application in connection with a system and method for authentication of reviews submitted to a review website.
When choosing a new service, such as dining at a restaurant or staying at a hotel, it is common practice to seek the advice of people who have already used the service. Internet review sites have replaced word-of-mouth and guide books as common sources of such advice. Review sites allow customers to post comments and provide ratings in a public way. Customers increasingly use the public ratings to make their decisions and businesses have come to understand that this is a key advertising instrument. The public ratings provide the ability to express satisfaction or, more commonly, dissatisfaction with a service, to put pressure on establishments to keep their services up to the level of their prices, and to push for better service overall. However, the ratings are subject to abuse by both customers and businesses. Business owners may post fake positive reviews, while their competitors may post fake negative ones. The Internet review sites may put in place mechanisms to control trustworthiness. For example, by screening out reviews from close geographical proximity to each other or the service location, fake reviews generated by business owners may be reduced. Relatives may be prohibited from writing reviews and there may be an editorial board checking every rating before publishing it. These steps, however, are generally not enough to screen out all fake reviews. For example, a large network of friends of the owner can write comments and reviews. The significance of having good reviews has also lead to the emergence of a hidden market for fake reviews, with people writing them for a fee. This ease of generating fake reviews, good or bad, depending on whether the source is the business owner or a competitor, has caused problems for businesses that may have their business impacted and for customers, who are not able to rely on the accuracy of the reviews.
One approach to control the source of reviews is to provide customers with paper flyers, where a flash code is printed, that will enable the customer to access the review service. Such approach, however, provides a very weak protection, since the flyers can be very easily copied and distributed to non-customers. A more sophisticated approach allows credit card holders to post a review on a review site regarding a service for which they have paid with a specific credit card. The review can then be labeled as being that of a verified customer. This approach is of limited use where different credit cards or cash are being used for the transaction, or when several people make use of a service paid for by only one of them.
Some existing approaches for identifying fake reviews use automated programs which detect signals of potential irregularities, such as a large number of people writing reviews for the same hotel. Such systems allow potentially fraudulent comments to be flagged for review by human moderators. Also some data or text analytics techniques are used in order to detect a posteriori false reviews. These methods have drawbacks, including that the reliability of the detection algorithms is not perfect and in the case of detection of a posteriori false reviews, the reviews may have been online for some time before a problem is detected and may have already had some negative influence on the readers.
There remains a need for a system and method for improving the ability to verify that a review of a service is submitted by a customer and thus improve the trust placed in public ratings.